Thursday, May 31, 2012

In the immediate aftermath of the assassination of President
Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, the heir to the power of the presidency,
communicated by telephone with three people - Attorney General Robert Kennedy,
Judge Sarah Hughes and his personal tax attorney J. Waddy Bullion. He called
RFK to get the exact wording of the oath of office, Sarah Hughes to get her to
come to Love Field to administer the oath and with Bullion he talked about the
need to change his stock portfolio, expressing particular concern about his
Halliburton stock.

Russ Baker, in “Family
of Secrets,” (p. 132), reports that “Pat Holloway, former attorney for both
Poppy Bush and Jack Crichton, recounted to me an incident involving LBJ that
had greatly disturbed him. This was around 1 P.M. on November 22, 1963, just as
Kennedy was being pronounced dead…The switchboard operator excitedly noted that
she was patching the vice president through from Parkland Hospital to
Holloway’s boss, firm senior partner Waddy Bullion, who was LBJ’s personal tax
lawyer. The operator invited Holloway to listen in. LBJ was talking ‘not about
conspiracy or about the tragedy,’ Holloway recalled, ‘I heard him say, ‘Oh, I
got to get rid of my goddamn Halliburton stock.’”

Baker also notes that, “Halliburton was also deeply involved
in defense contracting, through its subsidiary Brown and Root (Later Kellog
Brown & Root KBR) the politically wired Texas
engineering firm. Brown and Root had taken a giant leap into military
contracting when Lyndon Johnson, its political protégé, became president.” Both
G. R. and R.O. Brown were on the Halliburton board, as was John Connally, who
was wounded in the fuselage of bullets that killed Kennedy.

Some have considered it peculiar that one thing Johnson did
not do once he assumed the presidency, at least on the public record, was to
inquire about the national security status, the military posture or the
possibility that the nation would be attacked, or was under attack by foreign
enemies.

In fact, the new President had twice left behind the military
aide with the “black bag” containing secure communication and nuclear attack
codes. The “bagman” had been left behind in the motorcade when LBJ was rushed
to ParklandHospital
and then again when the new president quickly and secretly left the hospital
for Air Force One. While the man with the nuclear codes did catch up to LBJ and
remained nearby, he was generally ignored during the crisis.

In his book “The Day
Kennedy was Shot,” Jim Bishop relates how Gearhart became “separated from
the VIP portion of the motorcade as it raced
to Parkland and after arriving he did not know where the
President was nor whom he was. The Secret Service kept him away from the booth
where LBJ had been placed and that Johnson and Gearhart had been separated
again, when LBJ raced to Love Field."

Tagging along almost unnoticed on the trip to Love Field,
Gearhart had to force his way onto a policeman’s lap to keep up with the
president.

The “bagman” was Ira Gearhart, a military officer who carried
a metal suitcase that contained the codes and ciphers the President needed to
communicate with military commanders and foreign leaders or to order a nuclear
strike. Gearhart had to remember the combination for the safety lock that
opened the bag, and was to stay near the President at all times.

In “The Death of a
President,” William Manchester wrote, “Warrant Officer Ira D. Gearhart, or
Shadow, had been assigned the most sinister task in the Presidential party. No
one called him by his Christian name, his surname, or even by his code name. He
was the ‘man with the satchel,’ or, more starkly, ‘the bagman’. The bag (also
known as ‘the black bag’ and ‘the football’) was a thirty-pound metal suitcase
with an intricate combination lock. Within were various Strangelove packets,
each bearing wax seals and the signatures of the Joint Chiefs. Inside one were
cryptic numbers which would permit the President to set up a crude hot line to
the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
and the President of France on four minutes’ notice. A second provided the
codes that would launch a nuclear attack. The rest contained pages of close
text enlivened by gaudy color cartoons. They looked like comic books — horror
comics, really, because they had been carefully designed so that anyone of
Kennedy’s three military aides could quickly tell him how many million
casualties would result from Retaliation Able, Retaliation Baker, Retaliation
Charlie, etc. Taz Shepard had prepared these doomsday books. No one liked to
think about them, much less talk about them, and on trips the man with the
football was treated as a pariah.”

In his book “Apocalypse
Soon” former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara wrote, “The concept of
the Football came about in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. President
John F. Kennedy was concerned that some Soviet commander in Cuba
might launch their missiles without authorization from Moscow.
After the crisis, Kennedy ordered a review of the U.S. Nuclear Command and
Control system. The result was the highly classified National Security Action
Memorandum that created the Football. It has been suggested that the nickname
Football was derived from an attack plan code named Drop-Kick.”

“The playbook is said to contain 75 pages of options, to be
used against four primary groups: Russian nuclear forces; conventional military
forces; military and political leadership and economic/industrial targets. The
options are further divided into Major Attack Options (MAOs), Selected Attack
Options (SAOs), and Limited Attack Options (LAOs).
With the SATCOM radio and handset, the president can contact the National
Command Authority (NCA) and the North American Aerospace Defense Command
(NORAD). To make rapid comprehension of the materials easier, the options are
described in a heavily summarized format and depicted using simple images. The
Football also contains the locations of various bunkers and airborne
command-post aircraft, procedures for communicating over civilian networks, and
other information useful in a nuclear-emergency situation.”

“The ‘Nuclear Football,’ otherwise known as the President's
Emergency Satchel, is a specially-outfitted, black-colored briefcase used by
President of the United States
to authorize the use of nuclear weapons. While its exact contents and operation
are highly classified, several sources have provided details of the bag. It is
presumed to hold a secure SATCOM radio and handset, the daily nuclear launch
codes known as the ‘Gold Codes,’ and the President's Decision Book—the ‘nuclear
playbook’ that the President would rely on should a decision to use nuclear
weapons be made, based on the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP). The
National Security Agency updates the Gold Codes daily.”

“The Football is carried by one of the rotating Presidential Aides (one from
each of the five service branches), who occasionally is physically attached to
the briefcase. This person is a commissioned officer in the U.S.
military, pay-grade O-4 or above, who has undergone the nation's most rigorous
background check (Yankee White). These officers are required to keep the
Football within ready access of the President at all times. Consequently, an
aide, Football in hand, is always either standing/walking near the President or
riding in Air Force One/Marine One/Motorcade with him.”

As McNamara describes it, “The case itself is a metallic, possibly
bullet-proof, modified Zero-Halliburtonbriefcase which is carried inside of a leather "jacket". The
entire package weights approximately 40 pounds (18 kg). A small antenna, presumably
for the SATCOM radio, protrudes from the bag near the handle. Contrary to
popular belief, the ‘football/ is not handcuffed to aides. Rather, carriers
employ a black cable that loops around the handle of the bag and the wrist of
the aide.”

“Zero-Halliburton” is the name of the company that
manufactured the case, which brings us back to the Halliburton company and
LBJ’s phone call to his tax attorney J. Waddy Bullion, concerning his Halliburton
stock.

In “From Russia With
Love,” a spy thriller novel read by both President Kennedy and his alleged
assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, Ian Fleming has his secret agent 007 utilize a
custom attaché case that included a concealed dagger, a sniper’s rifle that broke
down and fit into the stock and a special latch that exploded if not opened
correctly, which seems to have been inspired by the Halliburton case.

According to the official Zero-Halliburton web site: “In
1938, Earle P. Halliburton, a globetrotting businessman, commissioned a team of
aircraft engineers to build him cases that could withstand the rough terrain of
the Texas oilfields in the back
of his truck. The original aluminum case was born, becoming the very definition
of protection and ruggedness in business and travel cases. Every effort has
been made ensure that only the finest material, the most advanced techniques,
and the most precise crafting are employed to make each and every case. That
heritage continues today.”

“Today, that aluminum case, created
nearly 70 years ago is the prototype for style, sophistication, and uniqueness.
However, it has never lost sight of its heritage: protecting your belongings
wherever your journeys take you. The original aluminum case we introduced to the
world over seven decades ago has taken hold of people’s imagination and stands
as icon of strength, security, endurance, and fashion. It blazed new territory
for design, providing a unique, unmistakable presence that cannot be imitated.”

“All of our signature aluminum
cases start with a two-ton coil of aircraft grade aluminum. After being cut
into individual pieces, the aluminum is “deep-drawn” over special steel dies
using 440 tons of pressure. As the shape is formed, the molecular structure of
the aluminum actually changes, resulting in a shell that’s free of wrinkling,
distortion and manufacturing inconsistencies. Following the deep-draw
process, the shell is heated to more than 1000 degrees Fahrenheit and then
quickly cooled, making the aluminum even stronger and more durable. Each
shell is then buffed and electro-chemically anodized to add color and prevent
corrosion. After the shell is completed, it takes the skillful hand of a
trained craftsman to make each case worthy of the Zero Halliburton name.”

“Today, the same creative spirit that challenged the conventions of what
business cases should look like-while raising the expected standards for their
performance-has given rise to a new generation of inventive cases with
unmatched performance. We are expanding the boundaries of personal business and
travel products by once again incorporating the most advanced materials
available and creating solutions to satisfy your most challenging needs. A
perfect combination of sound design principles and innovation that could have
only come from Zero Halliburton.”

“In 1946, independent of any relationship with Halliburton,
a metal fabrication company called Zierold Company changed its name to Zero
Corporation. In 1952, Mr. Halliburton sold his travel case division to the
recently created metal fabrication company Zero Corporation, officially ending
any Halliburton Company's involvement in the making of aluminum cases. The new
division was renamed Zero Halliburton.”

“In January 2007, Zero Halliburton, a division of Zero
manufacturing, was sold to Japan’s
largest luggage company, Ace Company Ltd. Zero Halliburton remains an American
Company.”

Interesting Facts –

“Zero Halliburton cases have been used to carry Apollo
mission moon rocks, academy award Oscars and skates for US speed skating team.”

“Zero Halliburton products have appeared in many movies and televisions shows
over the last decades such as ‘Independence day,’ ‘Lost,’ ‘Men in Black,’
‘Ocean’s Eleven’ and ‘Mission Impossible.’”

On April 24, 1999,
President Bill Clinton left NATO's 50th anniversary summit, being held at the RonaldReaganBuilding
in Washington, D.C..
The carrier and the football were left behind. The aide walked the half-mile
back to the White House alone. The integrity of the football and the state of
the officer were intact. Similar incidents have occurred with Presidents Gerald
Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush.

A specially modified Zero-Halliburton case was used to carry
the special communications and nuclear attack codes by the president’s military
aid Ira Gearhart on November 22, 1963.

Around 1 PM on November 22, 1963, within a half
hour of becoming president with the death of JFK, one of the first things
President Johnson does is call his tax attorney J. W. Bullion to ask about his
Halliburton stock.

According to “A Money
Tree Grows in Texas,” (1968, p. 100), a $1,000 investment in
Halliburton in 1948 when the company was originally available to the public
would be worth $19,700.00 in 1968.

The corporate headquarters for Halliburton was listed as
3211 SouthlandCenter,
Dallas, Texas,
where the Dallas Sheraton was located, the White House Communications Agency
(WHCA) had set up their base station and where “Maurice Bishop” had met Lee
Harvey Oswald and Anthony Veciana in the lobby in the summer of 1963.

On the board of directors of Halliburton were John B.
Connally, who was wounded at DealeyPlaza,
and G. R. and R.O. Brown of Brown Brothers, Brown & Root.

BK notes: As Linda M. points out, R.O. Brown was not one of the Browns of Brown & Root, and Russ Baker notes that John Connally was not on the board at the time of the assassination.

In his book “Family of
Secrets,” Russ Baker also reports that (p. 131-132), “Meanwhile, the
Kennedy assassination had put into the White House Lyndon Baines Johnson, who
had a long-standing but little-known relationship with the Bush family. This
dates back at least to 1953, when Prescott Bush joined Johnson in the U.S.
Senate…That same year, Poppy Bush started Zapata Petroleum with Hugh and
William Liedtke, who as law students at the University
of Texas several years earlier, had
rented LBJ’s guesthouse. Later, Bush became close with LBJ’s chief financers,
George and Herman Brown, the founders of the construction giant Brown and Root
(which later became part of Halliburton).

After helping establish the Continuity of Government (COG)
plans in the 1980s and serving as Vice President, Cheney left government and became
head of Halliburton.

Erle P. Halliburton

Erle Palmer Halliburton (September 22, 1892, near Henning, Tennessee -
October 13, 1957, in Los Angeles) was an American businessman specializing
in the oil business.

Prior to United
States entry into World War I,
Halliburton gained exposure to shipboard engineering as a member of the United States Navy. After his honorable discharge in 1915, he headed for
the oilfields of California, where he was able to apply techniques analogous
to the technology with which he had worked in the Navy. His drive and his sense
of innovation soon brought him into conflict with his boss, Almond Perkins.
Halliburton later quipped that getting hired and getting fired by the Perkins
Oil Well Cementing Company were the two best opportunities he had ever
received.[1]

Halliburton (/ˈhælɨbɜrtən/; NYSE: HAL) is
one of the world's largest[7]oilfield services
companies with operations in more than 70 countries. It has hundreds of
subsidiaries, affiliates, branches, brands, and divisions worldwide and employs
over 60,000 people.[6]

The company has dual headquarters located in Houston and in Dubai, where Chairman
and CEODavid
Lesar works and resides, "to focus [the] company’s Eastern
Hemisphere Growth."[8] The
company will remain incorporated in the United
States.[9][10][11]

Halliburton's major business segment is the Energy Services
Group (ESG). ESG provides technical products and services for petroleum and natural gas
exploration and production. Halliburton's former subsidiary, KBR, is a major construction company of refineries, oil fields, pipelines, and chemical
plants. Halliburton announced on April
5, 2007 that it had finally broken ties with KBR, which had been
its contracting, engineering and construction unit as a part of the company for
44 years.[12]

Company History:

Zero Corporation is a leading designer and manufacturer of
enclosure, cooling, and other systems, primarily for the electronics industry.
Zero products include electronic cabinets, card cages, backplanes, power
supply, and such thermal management systems as closed-loop air conditioning
systems and motorized impellers. Sales to the electronics and related
industries account for nearly 75 percent of Zero's annual revenues. Zero is
also a leading worldwide designer and manufacturer of air cargo containers,
systems, and accessories for companies including American, United, Airbus, and
others. On the consumer level, Zero manufactures the world-famous line of Zero
Halliburton luggage; these distinctive metal suitcases, briefcases, and
carrying cases are sold in more than 30 countries. With manufacturing plants in
the United States, Europe, and Mexico, Zero serves a customer base of over
20,000, none of which accounts for more than five percent of Zero's annual
sales, which reached $206 million in 1995 (fiscal year ended 3/31/96).
Throughout its history, Zero has been so successful at capturing the largest
share of its market that the "zero case" has become a generic term.

Scrap Metal Origins

German immigrant Herman Zierold founded a small sheet metal
business in Los Angeles in the
early part of the century. By the end of the Second World War, Zierold's
company had ten employees and annual sales of about $300,000; Zierold himself
delivered his company's precision aluminum and sheet metal products. In 1951,
Zierold sold his business to Jack Gilbert, who renamed the company Zierold
Manufacturing Co. Gilbert had dropped out of high school after his father died
during the Depression. Working a variety of jobs, including a stint with
Douglas Aircraft during the Second World War, Gilbert decided to go into
business for himself. Gilbert's interest was in the nascent electronics
industry and the need for precision sheet metal products. "I looked at 30
or 35 companies," Gilbert told Forbes, "until I found Zierold
Metal Co. Zierold was into precision aluminum work, and that was the future in
sheet metal."

Gilbert offered Zierold $350,000 for the company, with a
$50,000 down payment raised by mortgaging his home. Gilbert and Zierold agreed
that Zierold would finance the rest; if Gilbert missed installments, the
business would revert back to Zierold. According to Gilbert: "Herman went
down the street and made a bet with a scrap dealer that he'd have the business
back in a year." By the time Gilbert paid off the last of his installments,
however, Herman Zierold was accepting stock in the company instead of cash.

In the postwar years, Los Angeles
and other areas were overcrowded with sheet metal companies, but Gilbert's
former association with Douglas led him in a direction
that would help Zierold stand out from the rest. From friends at Douglas,
Gilbert learned that company was purchasing precision aluminum boxes to cover
their electronic systems, paying as much as $600 for a custom-made box to house
electronic components. As Gilbert told Forbes, "I couldn't
believe it. I thought those parts ought to sell for about $35."

Gilbert set out to produce a box that was simple and
inexpensive to make, developing a process to make deep-drawn boxes. In the
deep-drawn process, aluminum was subjected to pressures high enough to
press--rather than stretch--the metal around a die, creating a seamless box.
Because the metal was pressed, causing its molecules to flow around the die,
the process eliminated the weaknesses associated with stretching metal. By developing
his own dies, Gilbert was able to produce boxes in standardized sizes far more
quickly and cheaply than if the boxes needed to be custom-made. Gilbert began
taking orders from the aerospace and electronics industries for boxes of
various sizes. The company bore the cost for designing and building the dies,
which at the time cost between $300 and $1,200, eating into the profits, if
any, of an order and placing a heavy financial burden on the company.

By the mid-1950s, the strain of producing the dies forced
Zierold to turn business away. Gilbert sought financing, but he worried about
losing control of the company. A Small Business Administration loan, however,
kept the business afloat, and in 1957, Zierold received new help in the form of
a $250,000 investment by Alfred Reddock, a venture capitalist. After Reddock
agreed to join the company's board of directors, Zierold gained the credibility
it needed to go public, which it did in 1959. A name change soon followed. For
years, many of the company's customers had been mistaking "Zierold"
for "Zero," going so far as to make out checks to the company under
that name. In response, Gilbert changed the company's name to Zero
Manufacturing Co.

Over the next decade, the company continued building its
collection of dies. An acquisition offer in the mid-1960s by Bendix led Zero to
expand its operations beyond California.
With no intention to sell, Gilbert nonetheless met with Bendix in order to
discover the reasons behind that company's interest in Zero. Learning that
Bendix was intent on acquiring sheet metal operations located near the
Californian, southern, and New England aerospace markets, Gilbert traveled to
manufacturers in those areas, signing on such large concerns as Martin Marietta
and Raytheon as Zero customers. Soon after, Zero opened manufacturing
facilities in Massachusetts and Florida.
Despite gaining such large companies as customers, Gilbert remained determined
that no company would account for more than five percent of Zero's sales; as a
result orders generally averaged $10,000 or less.

A Brief Stumble in the 1970s

Gilbert next sought to diversify the company's operations.
In 1969, Zero purchased the Halliburton luggage-making operations from the
Halliburton oil service company. The Zero Halliburton line soon gained
worldwide fame. Sales of the line of luggage and cases for photographic
equipment rose from $200,000 at the time of the acquisition to nearly $3
million by the end of the 1970s. The company next moved into producing aircraft
hydraulic systems and related aircraft devices. Zero's reputation was also
enhanced by being chosen to build the cases that would transport moon rocks
gathered from the first lunar landing back to Earth.

Yet the company stumbled in the early 1970s. Pursuing a plan
to round out the company's operations, Zero made a number of other acquisitions
seeking to bring the company into the heating and cooling business. However, a
downturn in the economy, and especially in the electronics industry, cut deeply
into Zero's profits and caused the company to post operating losses--including
a $2 million write-off from selling its new acquisitions--in the first two
years of the new decade. By 1973, Zero again turned profitable, earning
$600,000 on sales of $22 million. The company changed its name again, to Zero
Corporation. The company's success, particularly the success of its deep-drawn
manufacturing process, had already caused the zero box to become a generic name
in the electronics and aerospace industries.

Zero's collection of dies had grown to over 1,500, which
gave the company an edge over competitors making costlier custom-made
enclosures, while discouraging others from entering the field in direct
competition with Zero. By the late 1970s, nearly all of Zero's die collection
had been fully amortized. Sales, with customers including 35 of the 50 largest
computer manufacturers in the United States, such as IBM,
Burroughs, and Digital Equipment, reached $66 million by 1979, with net
earnings of $4.7 million, and a five-year compounded growth rate of 25 percent.
The following year, Gilbert retired from full-time management of the company
and was replaced by Howard W. Hill. Two years later, Hill was joined by Wilford
"Woody" Godbold, a former mergers and acquisitions specialist with
Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, a Los Angeles
law firm. Godbold, who was raised in Hawaii,
went to Stanford as an undergraduate, and received a law degree from UCLA after
a stint in the Navy, had served as Zero's corporate counsel before joining the
company as executive vice-president. When Hill retired in 1985, Godbold took
over as chief executive officer.

The 1980s and Beyond

Under Godbold, the company again began a series of
acquisitions to diversify operations, buying eight companies in the first half
of the decade for a total outlay of about $20 million. These new
acquisitions--for example, the 1985 purchase of Contempo Engineering Co. of
Glendale, California, a maker of
air conditioning systems for computer installations--centered primarily on the
electronics industry. The company's customer base grew to include 187 of the
200 largest electronics manufacturers, giving Zero an 85 percent share of the
enclosure market. Zero's production facilities had grown to include 16 plants
in the United States
and England. By
then, rather than contracting Zero to custom-make a die, many manufacturers
were designing their electronics equipment to fit one of Zero's 1,700 basic
dies, which had expanded to provide capacity for some 40,000 box sizes ranging
from a few inches to six-foot boxes used to house Stinger missiles. "But
there always seems to be one more size we haven't made," Godbold told
the Los Angeles Business Journal, and Zero continued to design and
produce custom dies for new orders. Most orders involved short production runs,
producing high margins for the company--generally nine to ten percent, compared
to three percent among most metal manufacturers.

Zero's 1985 sales topped $117 million, bringing net earnings
of $11.5 million, which included a $7 million gain from the sale of its Ocean
Technology subsidiary. Aiding Zero's growth was the growth of its subsidiaries,
particular its Electronics Solutions subsidiary, a computer manufacturing
subcontractor acquired in 1985. Between 1987 and 1988, revenues jumped from
$139 million to $171 million, with a rise in earnings to $16 million in 1988.

However, a slump in the electronics industry, and cuts in
defense spending as the Cold War ended, coupled with a slide into a recession
as the 1990s began, slowed Zero down. Sales, which neared $200 million in 1990,
fell to $160 million. Per share income also dropped, from $1.02 to $0.62. In an
effort to cut operating costs, Godbold moved its Los
Angeles factory to Salt Lake City,
slashing the company's expenses for workers' compensation, health care, and
wages. The company consolidated a number of its remaining California
plants to cut operating costs further. Godbold, who served as chairman of the
California Chamber of Commerce, was widely criticized for the move. Yet, as Godbold
told World Trade, "It wasn't an easy thing for us, but the costs
of doing business in the state were eating us alive. We had to do it to remain
competitive."

The Utah move
helped spur the company's sagging profits. Zero also began a new wave of acquisitions,
including the 1993 purchase of J.H. Sessions & Sons of Connecticut,
which manufactured case hardware such as handles and hinges and other materials
for annual sales of $4 million. Orders from the airline industry also picked
up--after a long slump due not only to the recession, but also to fears of
terrorism surrounding the Gulf War--including a contact to supply baggage/cargo
systems to 50 of United Airlines' Airbus planes. Yet the company's foreign
sales were hurt by the slide into the European recession, which saw
international revenues drop from over $21 million in 1992 to $15.5 million in
1994.

Total sales grew only at four percent between 1992 and 1995,
as compared to the company's former 18-year, 25 percent average growth rate.
Nonetheless, Zero remained solidly profitable, with net earnings climbing from
$9.7 million in 1991 to nearly $15 million by 1994. In 1995, Zero began
acquisitions of three new companies, Precision Fabrication Technologies, which
manufactured modular enclosures, data communications products, and accessories
for the electronics and telecommunications industries; Electro-Mechanical
Imagineering, Inc. (EMI), a maker of enclosure, mounting, and protective
devices for closed-circuit television security devices; and G.W. Pearce &
Sons Ltd., a UK-based deep-drawn aluminum products manufacturer. Combined,
these acquisitions added $16 million to Zero's revenues. Total revenues reached
$206 million in fiscal year 1996, producing net earnings of nearly $17 million.

Several more acquisitions followed in the first half of
1996. The Zero Halliburton line expanded to include cases for the booming
mobile computing market. In January 1996, Zero launched a new subsidiary, Zero
Integrated Systems, to design, engineer, and manufacture completely integrated
electronic systems, as well as to provide cost analysis and quality testing
services. After more than forty years, Zero had at last moved inside the box.

Saturday, May 26, 2012

–Release the Bay
of Pigs Reports, the Joannides file
and all the remaining government records on the assassination of President John
F. Kennedy.

John F. Kennedy - May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963

Pursing the Negative Template

Most American presidents and historical figures are honored
on their birthday, but few people would know that May 29th is the
birthday of John F. Kennedy, the thirty-fifth president of the United
States, and instead, we think of him on the
day he was murdered.

While his birthday goes unrecognized, everybody who was
alive at the time or with any sense of history registers November 22 with the
assassination of President Kennedy, just as December 7th and
September 11th are recognized as watershed benchmarks of modern
American history.

John F. Kennedy was born on May 29th 1917 in the master bedroom on the
second floor of 83 Beals Street, Brookline,
Massachusetts. The Harvard educated
Navy war hero would be elected to Congress, serve as a U.S.
Senator and President of the United States
until he was assassinated while riding in a motorcade through downtown Dallas
on November 22, 1963.

Although the Kennedy family says they would rather celebrate
JFK’s life, administration and policies rather than his death, they are annually
seen kneeling by the eternal flame at the Arlington
grave site every November 22nd, and his life and policies go generally
unheralded as we live through the 50th anniversary of his
administration.

The Bay of Pigs was duly noted, the establishment of the
White House Situation Room (WHSR) was honored by naming it after Kennedy, and
the Cuban Missile Crisis will be remembered, but the 50th
anniversary of the assassination is greatly anticipated with a plethora of
feature articles, books, documentary films and major motion pictures due out
over the next few years.

This renewed interest in the assassination is expected to
fuel the debates over whether the assassination was the act of one deranged
gunman or the result of a well planned and successfully executed conspiracy,
and add credence to the call for the release of the remaining records related
to the assassination that are still being withheld by the government.

Conspiracy theorists, who outnumber those who defend the Warren
Commission’s lone-gunman conclusion by an eight to one margin, are both united
in the call for the release of all the remaining government records on the
assassination, which was mandated by a law that is not being effectively
enforced.\

The JFK Act of 1992, although “the law of land,” has seen no
Congressional oversight despite the flagrant destruction of files, the loss of
many records and the continued withholding of thousands of records, in the name
of national security, despite the fact they were created nearly fifty years
ago.

Professor Peter Dale Scott, who has studied the
assassination closely, suggests a “Negative-Template” thesis in which the most
significant records are those that are destroyed, missing or with held, and
that any investigation of the assassination itself should focus on those
records.

There are a number of active efforts underway to replicate
the destroyed files, locate those that are missing and to free those that are
being withheld, all without the support and cooperation of Congress, the courts
or the administration.

Despite the reluctance of Congress to conduct oversight
hearings of the JFK Act for the past fifteen years, there is an active internet
lobby effort to at least try and convince Congress to do its job, however
unlikely that seems.

The courts have recently ruled against release of the
remaining withheld internal CIA report on
the April 17, 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and seem reluctant to order
the CIA to release their operational files
on the now deceased CIA officer who ran the
anti-Castro Cuban group that the accused assassin associated with, and who
later effectively stonewalled the House Select Committee on Assassination
(HSCA), assigned to investigate the assassination.

The President, in his first act in office, issued an
Executive Order that called for the implementation of a new policy of transparency
and open government, and established the Declassification Review Board, which
at first said it was going to place a high priority on topics of public
interest, including the JFK Assassination, but has since back-tracked and may
not pursue any JFK assassination records at all.

Jim Lesar wrote a letter requesting the NARA
to A – that goes unanswered, as does the suggestion for the NARA
to create a special project to declassify the JFK Assassination Records, as
they have done with the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile
Crisis.

When the NARA
asked for public input, Dan Alcorn suggested they create the special
assassination records project, and with over three dozen public votes and
positive comments, the suggestion was the top rated idea presented on the
public forum.

Yet, NARA
has so far failed to respond.

The JFK Act requires all the records to be released by 2017
but it is widely expected that the CIA and
other agencies will request the President to continued withholding these
records indefinably on grounds of national security. This date should be
accelerated and the records released by 2013, which can happen if they are
included among the records reviewed by the NDC.

Regardless of whether there was a conspiracy to kill
President Kennedy, there is certainly one to hide the true record of his death,
as a group of distinguished British historians put it, “there has never been a
more subversive, conspiratorial, unpatriotic or endangering course for the
security of the United States and the world than the attempt by the United
States Government to hide the murderers of its President.”

It is now in the interests of national security, not to withhold
the remaining records on the fifty year old assassination of President Kennedy,
but to release them to the public.

The May 29th Movement is hereby launched in order
to support of all of these efforts, and to call attention to and build national
momentum towards a release of all the remaining JFK assassination records by
2013.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

A study the assassination of President Kennedy through what is reported on the radio broadcast transmissions provides a unique
perspective into the event.

The existing tapes of Air Force One radio communications
on 11/22/63 begin at
Carswell AFB in Fort Worth, with
the pilot of Air Force One reporting his departure and estimated time of
arrival in Dallas.

Carswell AFB is a Strategic Air Command facility whose
commanding officer, at first, refused to allow the public onto the base to see
the President arrive and depart, but later relented under pressure from the
White house.

According to William Manchester, “That Friday Lyndon
Johnson did not know that John Kennedy had ordered the taping of all Angel
conversations while the plane was in flight,” an order that apparently also
included the taping of all Special Air Mission (SAM)
flights because among the recorded patches on the tapes are communications
between the Cabinet plane and the White House and Andrews and the Pentagon and
General LeMay’s SAM flight from Canada,
neither of which involved Air Force One.

William Manchester’s “The Death of a President” (1967 pages
61-63)

“Tourists thought of
the President’s home as stationary, at 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue. They were wrong. The White
House was capable of multiple division. It could be in several cities
simultaneously. The (telephone switchboard) girls on the fourth floor of the ExecutiveOfficeBuilding
remained on duty, but the real White House was wherever Lancer happened to be,
and once he hit the road the key switchboard was a jungle of color-coded wires
in the executive mansion’s east basement, manned by elite Signal Corps
technicians of the White House Communications Agency. It was a national
security precaution that Lancer always be within five minutes of a telephone.”

“In the autumn of 1963 the White House telephone number was still NA-tional
8-1414, that winter the digits took over and it was changed to 456-1414, and
when the man of the house was home communications were relatively simple.
Of course, the President himself didn’t answer the phone. A light would flash
on a forty-bulb switchboard on the fourth floor of the Executive Office
Building and if you knew a name of a Presidential aide one of the women
operators would instantly connect you with the proper extension, from which you
could be transferred to the oval office, or the mansion.”

“But the moment the
Chief Executive left his helipad all that changed. Elaborate security
precautions went into effect.”

“Even names were changed. Codes replaced them, from time to time names and
groupings were changed…The White House was no longer the White House. It was
Castle (aka Crown), and during a trip the President’s precise location at any
given moment was Charcoal. He, himself was no longer John Kennedy, he was
Lancer, who was married to Lace, whose children were a daughter named Lyric and
a son named Lark. The First Family was all in the L’s — though Lyric’s and
Lark’s grandmother lived in a Georgetown
house which was referred to as Hamlet. Secret Service men were in the D’s.
Chief James J. Rowley was Domino, Digest, Dazzle, Deacon, Debut, and Tom Wells
of the kiddie detail were Drummer, Dresser and Dasher. W’s were for staff; Ken
O’Donnell, Lancer’s chief vassal was Wand. Evelyn Lincoln, was Willow,
Pierre Salinger, Wayside. Mac Kilduff who was to do Wayside’s press
chores on the Texas trip— and, who ironically, had been told to start looking
for another job, because Wand had decided that he was expendable — had
been christened Warrior. General’s Clifton
and McHugh were Watchman and Wing. Taz Shepard, who would be minding the
store at Castle during the Texas trip, was Witness. V’s were reserved for
the Vice-President and his family. Lyndon Johnson was Volunteer, Lady Bird, who
had never had much luck with names became Victoria.”

The SAM – the Andrews based Strategic Air Mission
detachment of the Air Force that was responsible for shuttling the President
and his cabinet utilized four primary frequencies that were set by the Liberty
station at Collins Radio headquarters in Cedar Rapids,
Iowa. Two other radio frequencies were used
by the White House Communications Agency (WHCA) on the ground where ever the
President was or would be. The Secret Service and WHCA maintained the “Charlie”
channel for those units involved in the motorcade, while the Dallas Police
Department (DPD) utilized two channels, one strictly for the motorcade, and the
Dallas Sheriff’s Department had its own frequency used by its personnel.

Col. Ralph Albertazzle in “The Flying White House – The Story of Air Force One” (1979, Coward,
McCann & Georghegan, NY) wrote: “Air Force One’s communications center was
in constant radio contact with the motorcade and with the White House
Communications Agency’s temporary signal board in the Sheraton-Dallas Hotel.
From there, trunk lines linked the traveling White House with the real one in Washington,
the MilitaryCommandCenter at the Pentagon, the State
Department and Secret Service Headquarters.”

As explained by Manchester,
the man responsible for keeping the President within five minutes of a secure
phone line was Col. George McNally. Manchester:

“Colonel George McNally, alias Star —
this was the S group — saw to it that he was much closer than that (five
minutes). There were phones in the President’s helicopter, phones aboard
Aircraft 26000, portable phones spotted fifty feet away from every airfield
space where 26000 could park, and radiophones in his motorcade cars, operating
on two frequencies. Like the Secret Service and the Democratic National
Committee, Colonel McNally had a corps of advance men. By dawn of that Thursday
morning temporary switchboards had been installed in trailers and hotel rooms
in San Antonio, Houston,
Fort Worth, Dallas, Austin
and at the LBJ Ranch. Each had its own unlisted phone number.”

“The Dallas White House, for example, was in the Sheraton-Dallas Hotel. It
could be reached through RIverside 1-3421, RIverside
1-3422, and RIverside 1-3423, though anyone who dialed one of them and lacked a
code name of his own would find the conversation awkward.”

Manchester: “S’s advance man for the Texas trip was Warrant
Officer Art Bales (code name Sturdy) a gaunt thirty-year veteran who knew
every executive in the Southwest Bell Telephone Company could bug any line from
the nearest manhole or conduit and had the facilities to scramble almost any
conversation, or to disconnect it without notice. When out of town the
President needed one clear circuit to Washington
at all times, which meant that Bales had to pull the plug on a Cabinet member,
if necessary.”

“In motorcades Bales would ride in the
Signals control car. By tradition this was the last vehicle in the caravan, and
his companion there, and his roommate at hotel stops, was a swarthy S man, Warrant
Officer Ira D. Gearhart. Gearhart (Shadow), had been assigned the most sinister
task in the Presidential party. No one called him by his Christian name, his
surname, or even by his code name. He was the “man with the satchel,” or, more
starkly, “the bagman”. The bag (also known as “the black bag” and “the
football”) was a thirty-pound metal suitcase with an intricate combination
lock. Within were various Strangelove packets, each bearing wax seals and the
signatures of the Joint Chiefs. Inside one were cryptic numbers which would
permit the President to set up a crude hot line to the Prime Minister of the United
Kingdom and the President of France on four
minutes’ notice. A second provided the codes that would launch a nuclear
attack.”

The motorcade had their own radio channel – “Charlie”
channel that was set up by the WHCA and included the Secret Service, with an
operational base set up at the Dallas Sheraton Hotel, a channel that was
monitored by the pilot of Air Force One, Col. Swindel, who decided not to join
the other crew members for lunch and remained in the cockpit.

From the information contained in Gerald Blaine’s The Kennedy Detail (w/ Lisa McCubbin,
Gallery, 2010­, p. 215), it is apparent that as soon as bullets started flying,
Secret Service Kellerman, in the front passenger seat of the target car, was on
the radio, tuned to “Charlie Channel” reserved for motorcade security, saying,
“Lawson, this is Kellerman. We’re hit. Get us to the nearest hospital! Quick!”
when at the same time the second shot was fired and then the third, and fatal
head shot occurred, - while he was on the radio talking.

“As he was relaying the message, he heard one bang, and then
another, and as Greer trampled down on the accelerator, Kellerman felt the car
burst forward with such thrust he felt like it was jumping off the goddamned
road. Up ahead the lead car was nearing the overpass when the first shot was
fired. Through the open windows of the sedan, Agent Win Lawson heard the sharp
report and turned to look back through the rear window. He could see some
commotion in the president’s car behind him. Then Kellerman’s voice over the radio,
‘We’re hit!’”

If this is the case, then the sound of the third and fatal
head shot should have been broadcast over the open microphone on Charlie
Channel, along with Kellerman’s orders, and if it was broadcast, it should have
been taped if anyone was taping the proceedings, as the WHCA base at the Dallas
Sheraton could and should have been doing.

Without a tape of these broadcasts, we do have the reports
and testimony of a number of witnesses who heard what was said, and quote them
faithfully, as Air Force One pilot Swindel is quoted in “The Flying White
House,” as hearing Kellerman’s sudden broadcast “We’re hit” and “…Cover Volunteer!,”
and the resulting chaos clued him that something significant had happened in
the motorcade.

We do have tapes of the two DPD channels, recordings that
have been studied in detail and have produced numerous and controversial
studies and reports on what information is and isn’t on them. At 12:29, the Dallas Police channel reserved for
the motorcade was interrupted by a motorcycle radio that malfunctioned for four
minutes, during which time the President was assassinated. Tapes of this
inadvertent broadcast transmission are said to include the sounds of the rifle
shots, though there is some controversy over what it all means. Here, we are
only concerned with what are literally spoken words.

As one commentator noted however, the sudden lack of
communication ability was also suspicious. “In Dallas
the police radio was immobilized at 12.29. Channel One of the DP radio system
was rendered inoperative when someone within the dept. keyed his radio
microphone button for four minutes, making it impossible for any police
communication from the kill zone during the critical moments...and immediately
afterward.....Channel One was reserved that day for those officers in the
security of the President…From 12.29 till 12.33 the only audible sound on the
police audio tape is the rumbling of a motorcycle engine...In Dallas the press
telephone within the motorcade was immobilized. At 12.34 the radiophone in the
press car carrying the members of the wire services was rendered inoperative,
also...In fact a fight broke out between UPI's Merriman Smith and Jack Bell of
the AP. Bell finally managed to grab it after Smith has issued the initial report
that shots had been fired, but to Bell's dismay, the line inexplicably went
dead. In Washington there was a
crucial breakdown of communications when the telephone system in the capital went
out at approximately 12.33 pm. It
was almost an hour before full telephone service resumed...It was explained, that
it was due to overloaded phone lines…”

After Kellerman’s broadcast over “Charlie Channel” in the
course of the shooting, the second most significant radio communication was
made by Merriman Smith, the UPI White House correspondent in the press pool
car. Smith clearly heard three shots, immediately picked up the radio telephone
from the dashboard of the press pool car, dialed the UPI Dallas office and when
it was picked up, yelled, “Bulletin! Preceed! Three shots fired at President
Kennedy as he rode in a motorcade through downtown Dallas.”

According to other reporters in the car, Smith then broke
the radiophone so it could not be operated, preventing them from filing similar
reports.

Wilborn Hampton, the youngest United Press International
(UPI) reporter at the Dallas
bureau, took the call from Merriman Smith in the motorcade with first word of
the president's shooting. Hampton
later reported:

“It had been very
hectic in the office for the previous two days. President John F. Kennedy was
making a highly publicized trip to Texas,
going to five cities and making a major speech in Dallas.
Everybody in the Dallas office had
been busy on the story. Everybody, that is, except me. Since I was the most
inexperienced reporter on the staff, I did not have a lot to do with covering
Kennedy’s trip. As a result, I had felt like a fifth wheel around the office
since the President had arrived in Texas.
The only part I had played so far in covering the President’s visit was to take
some dictation over the telephone the previous day from Merriman Smith, who was
UPI’s chief White House reporter. But that was about to change in the next
couple of minutes. In fact, my whole life was about to change. So, there I was,
standing alone by the news desk, while there was a lull in the office.
President Kennedy has arrived at Love Field, the Dallas
airport, on a five-minute flight from Fort Worth,
and he was at that moment driving through downtown Dallas
in a motorcade on his way to the Trade Mart, where he was to make his speech.”

Hampton:

“There had been a flurry
of activity in the office with the President’s takeoff from Fort
Worth, where he had spent the previous night, and his
arrival in Dallas. Although Dallas
was considered hostile political territory to Kennedy, a large crowd turned out
to greet him at Love Field. Jackie Kennedy was given a bouquet of roses and
both the President and First Lady went over to shake hands with some of the
people at the airport. Merriman Smith, who was known by everyone who knew him
as Smitty, had even called in from the telephone in the press car to dictate a
paragraph about how surprisingly large the crowds were. But the office was
quiet now, everyone relaxing for a few moments until the President arrived at
the Trade Mart, and the frenzy of covering an American President would resume. So
I was alone as I stood by the news desk that day. I was wondering whether I
should offer to get sandwiches for the rest of the office from the diner across
the street.”

“Suddenly the telephone rang. I picked up the receiver and answered, ‘U.P.I.’”

“I immediately recognized Smitty’s voice from the day before. But this time
Smitty was shouting.”

Within a minute, Hampton would dictate what Smith told him
to another editor who punched it into the UPI teletype machine, pushing a
special bulletin button that would sound a bell alarm to prepare news desks
around the world for a special bulletin, and then began to type the report
which went out to all the UPI teletype machines in the world, including the
ones aboard AF1, the cabinet plane and in the Situation Room at the White
House.

[UPI’s Bob Chockrum notes that, “Ten bells are for a news
flash, five for a bulletin, four for urgent and three for advisory.”]

David Lifton: “The first transmission was the result of
Merriman Smith excitedly talking to (Wilborn Hampton) at the UPI Dallas office,
which means it went from his lips to UPI's Wilborn Hampton, who took the call;
then to staff editor Don Smith, who actually wrote the copy (along with Hampton);
and then it was handed to teletype operator Jim Tolbert, who actually punched
out the words onto perforated paper, and fed the punched paper-tape into the
teletype machine, pressing ‘send’ at 12:34 PM CST.”

[NOTE: "1234 PCS"
means "12:34 Central Standard
time. The initials on the typed line specifying the time of transmission are
those of the teletype operator – Jim Tolbert.]

After Smith filed his first emergency bulletin from the
Press Pool Car radiophone, he kept the phone from the AP pool reporter in the
back seat, but AP photographer James Alkins, who took a photo of the
President’s car in front of the TSBD, immediately ran into the TSBD, located a
phone and called his office. The AP wire report went out a few minutes after
the UPI report.

The White House Communications Agency (WHCA) car, as
explained by Manchester, is usually
the last one in the motorcade, and includes Arthur Bales, the chief WHCA
advance man in Dallas and Ira Gearheart
the “bagman” with the strategic communication and nuclear codes. Earlier Bales
had lunch with the top Secret Service and advance men at the Dallas Sheraton to
go over the details of the motorcade, and the Sheraton was where the WHCA base
station – the “Dallas White House” was located.

In his After Action report Bales wrote: “Following is
approximately the sequence of events, as recalled by the undersigned, in Dallas,
Texas, 22 November 1963.....The motorcade departed for the trip
through downtown Dallas and
to the Trade Mart. In the WHCA Communications Car were: A telco driver; the
undersigned WHCA Advance Officer; the WHCA Courier, Mr. Gearheart; and the
Telco special representative (or "Shadow"), Mr. Herb Smith.”

[BK Notes: From an obituary found by a Dallas
researcher, we learn that Herb Smith was a senior executive at the Dallas
telephone company, a necessary collaborator for Bales.]

Bales: ‘We were approximately six cars and two (Press and
Staff) buses behind the President. The motorcade had just passed the last
buildings on the route before entering the freeway to the Trade Mart. The WHCA
Communications Car was around two corners from and not in sight of the
President's car. Three explosions were heard, and I thought that they were
backfires from vehicles up ahead. Herb Smith remarked that firecrackers
were in appropriate for the occasion. Then the USSS Agent riding with the
President announced on the FM "Charlie" radio, "Lawson, he's
hit". The motorcade came to an abrupt halt with one bus and the WHCA car
still around two corners from the President. Realizing that emergency
communications facilities may be required on the spot, I instructed the driver
to get Mr. Gearhart immediately to the vicinity of the President and to keep
him there regardless of my own location. I, with the Telco representative, Mr.
Smith, then started running toward the scene of the shooting. As we rounded the
first corner the motorcade suddenly raced away. I commandeered a police
car and instructed the driver to take us immediately to the ParklandHospital. We arrived short minutes
after the President.”

When Bales got to the hospital, he immediately began
establishing secure phone communications with Washington and the WHCA base at
the Sheraton, seizing a wall of public telephones, except for one, the one
which Merriman Smith was relaying his second report to UPI.

Bales: “The ParklandHospital: The very limited
telephone facilities at the hospital were tied up by the members of the Press
Pool. I immediately seized all but one line (leaving Merriman Smith on the one
most remote from the Emergency Rooms) and established direct circuits to the
Signal Board in Washington; the
Dallas White House Bd; and to the Signal board via the Dallas and Fort Worth
White House Boards. I assigned police officers to guard these phones and
instructed the individual Signal Operators in Washington
who were on these circuits to handle no other calls, but to guard these lines
exclusively.”

In an unofficial history of UPI it is noted: “The press car
followed the limousine as it raced to ParklandHospital. As (Merriman) Smith ran
up to the limousine parked at the emergency entrance, he saw Kennedy face down
on the back seat, with Jacqueline Kennedy cradling her arms around the
president's head. Smith saw a secret service agent he knew and asked him about
Kennedy. The agent, Clint Hill, responded: ‘He's dead.’ Smith went inside,
found a phone and reached (UPI editor in New York)
Fallon, who dictated the flash: ‘Kennedy seriously wounded, perhaps seriously,
perhaps fatally by assassins bullet.’

Since he jumped out of the communications car at the tail
end of the stalled motorcade and ran ahead, Bales hijacked a police car to get
to ParklandHospital,
where he immediately established secure communications over pay phones and caught
up with Ira Gearheart, the “Bagman.” At Parkland Gearheart was recognized by a
Secret Service Agent and stationed in the hall outside the small room where LBJ
and his wife were being kept.

Besides emergency numbers and codes to talk to other national
leaders, the special attaché case Gearheart carried contained the nuclear codes
that could send US nuclear missiles and bombs to their destinations. As Manchester
described it, these codes were accompanied by some text cards that allowed the
president to quickly determine what the results of his decisions would be.

Manchester: “The
rest contained pages of close text enlivened by gaudy color cartoons. They
looked like comic books — horror comics, really, because they had been
carefully designed so that any one of Kennedy’s three military aides could
quickly tell him how many million casualties would result from Retaliation
Able, Retaliation Baker, Retaliation Charlie, etc. Taz Shepard had prepared these doomsday books. No one liked to
think about them, much less talk about them, and on trips the man with the
football was treated as a pariah. He needed Art Bales company. His only job was
to stick around, log the satchel, and remember that vital combination in case
the duty aide forgot it. Yet both he and his ghastly burden were necessary. At
the outset of the nuclear age Harry Truman would have had four hours to think
things through if Soviet bombers had appeared over Canada
in force. In the Kennedy administration that time had been cut to fifteen minutes,
and it was shrinking.”

Taz Shepard, the President’s naval attaché, set up the White
House Situation Room, prepared the doomsday books, was holding down the fort at
“Crown” and is mentioned prominently on the Air Force One radio tapes.

The Doomsday bag, that he helped prepare, was then at the
side of Ira Gearheart, outside the Parkand hospital room where they were being
kept by the Secret Service. At some point, after it was determined that the
President was dead, it was decided to take LBJ to Love Field and put him aboard
Air Force One. Although some of the Kennedy aides thought Johnson would fly
back to DC aboard the same plane he flew in on, Air Force One was chosen, they
said, because it had better communications equipment.

When LBJ was rushed out secretly, before the death of the
President was officially announced, Gearheart was momentarily left behind, and
rushing to catch up, and had to sit on the lap of a Dallas
policeman for the ride to Love Field. After they were gone, Assistant Press
Secretary Malcolm Kilduff made the official announcement that the President had
died.

The official UPI history reads: “When White House deputy
press secretary Malcolm Kilduff gave official word at the hospital that Kennedy
was dead, Hampton, Joe Carter and Preston McGraw set up a three-man relay
between a pay phone and the news conference - one at the conference, one
running between and a third dictating to the bureau. That was backed up by
Virginia Payette on a second phone and Smith, who had found a third line. Smith
then went back to Air Force One, and witnessed the swearing-in of Lyndon
Johnson as president. Smith's account of the assassination won the 1964
Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.”

While the WHCA tapes only recorded the radio
communications from Air Force One while it airborne, we know that the first
thing LBJ did as President was to make three phone calls. One was to the office
of Judge Sarah Hughes, who he had arranged to be appointed to the federal bench
and was still waiting for their arrival at the Dallas Trade Mart. LBJ
instructed her office to get in touch with her and have her go immediately to
Air Force One to administer the oath of office. Another call was made to his
personal tax lawyer J. Waddy Bullion and the other to the Attorney General Robert
F. Kennedy, ostensibly to get the exact wording of the oath of office, but more
likely just to let Bobby know that he was now President.

The call to Bullion was the most bizarre, and possibly
significant. Whether LBJ made the call to Bullion from ParklandHospital or Air Force One is not
clear, but it was undoubtedly made by a land-line telephone before the swearing
in ceremony while the plane was still on the ground.

Although Bullion’s son has written a book, “In the Boat” (i.e. with LBJ) that claims
that LBJ’s call did not get through to his father, Russ Baker talked with one
of Bullion’s law partners, who was privy to the conversation, and reported
that: “Pat Holloway, former attorney to both Poppy Bush and Jack Crichton,
recounted to me an incident involving LBJ that had greatly disturbed him. This
was around 1 P.M. on November 22, 1963, just as Kennedy
was being pronounced dead. Holloway was heading home from the office and was
passing through the reception area. The switchboard operator excitedly noted
that she was patching the vice president through from Parkland
hospital to Holloway’s boss, firm senior partner Waddy Bullion, who was LBJ’s
personal tax lawyer. The operator invited Holloway to listen in. LBJ was
talking ‘not about conspiracy or about the tragedy,’ Hollway recalled. ‘I heard
him say: ‘Oh, I gotta get rid of my godamn Halliburton stock.’ Lyndon Johnson
was talking about the consequences of his political problems with his
Halliburton stock at a time when the president had been officially declared
dead. And that pissed me off….I really made me furious.’” 32

Bullion’s book, “In
the Boat” includes “accounts of the family's relationship with the
Johnson's as well as a in depth analysis of the hunting trips that both John
and Robert Kennedy made to the LBJ ranch, as well as a very detailed analysis
of the Johnson Trust which was formed to divest the family of assets which
would be a conflict of interest while holding the office of President.”

J. Waddy Bullion: Was born and raised in Eden
(Texas) and taught at EdenHigh School. completed the
University of Texas Law School in three years, majoring in tax law, and made
the highest grades in the history of the school. After graduation he served as
Special Attorney in the Office of Chief Counsel of the Bureau of IRS
until World War II. He served as a member of the U.S. Naval Reserve and during
the last three years of the war, was Assistant to the Administrative Aide to
the Commander-in-chief of the United States.”

In “A Money Tree Grows
in Texas” Jas. Walker Davis notes that “A $1,000 investment in Haliburton
Company in 1948 when the company was initially available to the public would be
worth as of the year-end 1968, $19,700.00. This included the following stock
distributions: 2 for 1 in 1953, 5 for 4, 1955; 2 for 1, 1964, 2 for 1,
1969.”

The Corporate office of Haliburton – 3211 SouthlandCenter, Dallas,
Texas – is in the same building in which
the Dallas Sheraton was located, and among the corporate officers of Haliburton
at the time were R. O. Brown and G. R. Brown (of Brown & Root) and J.B.
Connally, a Hailburton director and governor of Texas who was wounded in the
shooting.

It is also significant that J. W. Bullion was the personal
tax attorney for not only the new President but he also included Jack Crichton
as a client.

Jack Alston Crichton was one of the oil men who knew Oswald,
the accused assassin, through George DeMohrenschildet, and arranged for Illya
Mamantov to assist authorities in interpreting Marina Oswald in the immediate
aftermath of the assassination. Crichton was also chief of the local U.S. Army
Reserve Intelligence Unit, whose commander, Lt. Col. George Whitmeyer was an
unauthorized passenger in the Pilot Car, a half mile ahead of the motorcade,
which was driven by Deputy Police Chief Lumpin, another U.S. Army Reserve
Intelligence officer.

It should be noted that this car stopped briefly at the
corner of Houston and Elm and
informed one of the police officers on traffic duty, directly under the alleged
assassin’s window, that the motorcade was forthcoming. Those in the Pilot Car
were also tuned in to the special WHCA “Charlie Channel” radio, which they used
it to keep abreast of the location of the motorcade.

Peter Dale Scott also points out that Jack Crichton was
affiliated with the Dallas Civil Defense Post, and relates the possible
significance of another strange and possibly wayward telephone call that was
made at 12:25 PM, five minutes
before the assassination. At that time, the U.S. Fourth Army Headquarters at
Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas
received a telephone call over the regular, unsecured phone line: “This is
Silver Dollar calling to test communications. I read you loud and clear. How do
you read me?”

“Silver Dollar” was the code name for the National Emergency
Airborne command and control “Doomsday” plane – NEACAP. As Scott correctly surmises,
“The fact that NEACAP was airborne and making test calls might seem irrelevant
to events on the ground in Dallas,
until we learn that Crichton’s Dallas Civil Defense Post was part of its
network. Those with resource to such secure networks are in a position to
manipulate our country’s history, when necessary by provocation-deception
plots.”

“Silver Dollar,” the NEACAP “Doomsday” plane, was one of
several command and control planes operated by the Strategic Air Command as
part of a fleet that also included “Speckled Trout,” a plane often used by
General Curtis LeMay, Chief of Staff of the Air Force.

At 1:20 PM, while
LBJ was still at Parkland, Andrews AFB issued an order
for a plane to pick up Gen. LeMay in Toronto, Canada.
At 1:46 PM, twenty six minutes
later, an Air Force SAM C-140 departed
Andrews to pick up LeMay in Canada,
at the exact same time the Cabinet plane over the Pacific turned around to
return to Hawaii.

At 1:50 PM, LeMay
changed his point of pickup from Toronto
to Wiarton, Canad.a

The first news story naming Oswald was an AP report issued
at 2:35 PM CST, while 26000 (Air
Force One) was still on the ground in Dallas.

At the end of LBJ Tape Reel 1, Air Force One has yet to
depart Dallas, and the first patch
on Reel 1 Side 2 begins with Jerry (Behn), head of the White House detail of
the Secret Service in Washington,
being informed that they are still waiting for LBJ to be sworn in.

Air Fore One finally departs Dallas
at 2:47 PM CST (3:47 EST) for Andrews, and is in the air at the same
time as the Cabinet Plane and LeMay’s plane, and they
are all using the same four radio frequencies that can be heard on the Air
Force One radio transmission tapes.

According to Jim Bishop's book "The Day the President Was Shot" contains another revealing incident:

"Officials at the Pentagon were calling the White House
switchboard at the Dallas-Sheraton Hotel asking who was now in command. An
Officer grabbed the phone and assured the Pentagon that Secretary of Defense
Robert MacNamara and the Joint Chief of Staff ' are now the
President"."

Sunday, May 20, 2012

“’We have to know who Stranger is,’” Secretary Rusk said.
‘We don’t know what is happening in Dallas.
Who is the government now?’”

“The messages kept coming off the wire service machine and
finally one started grinding out the story of Lee Harvey Oswald and his
previous life in Russia
and his membership in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. This went against all
the preconceived theories we had established.”

“ 'If this is true,’ Secretary Rusk said, ‘this is
going to have repercussions around the world for years to come.’"

On November 22,
1963, most of President John F. Kennedy’s cabinet were in an
airplane over the Pacific on their way to Japan for a regional conference, including
Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon,
Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall, Secretary of Commerce Luther Hodges,
Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman, Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz and
Press Secretary Pierre Salinger.

The existing Air Force One tapes begin, not with radio
communications with Air Force One, but with riveting conversations between the
Cabinet plane and the White House Situation Room.

Air Force One and a similar plane nominally referred to as Air
Force Two were both in Texas with the President and the Vice President, while
the Cabinet was aboard SAM 86972, all planes
operated by the Special Air Mission, a detachment of the 89th Military Air Wing
out of Andrews Air Force base, Maryland, near Washington D.C.

SAM 86972 was a VC-137C modified
version of the Boeing 707-120 commercial airliner, but with different interior
furnishings and electronic equipment. Its primary mission was to provide first
class, worldwide transportation for the Vice-President of the United
States, Cabinet members and international
dignitaries.

According to official descriptions, “The interior of SAM
86972 was divided into three sections: Forward (crew area), center (stateroom)
and aft (passenger). The forward section had a communications center, a galley,
lavatory and 13-seat compartment with one table and two overhead bunks. The
center section was designed for VIP, with
conference tables, swivel chairs, projection screen, two convertible sofa-bunks
and a lavatory. The aft section was a combination staff and passenger areas,
and contained a Xerox machine, reclining seats, overhead bunks, tables, galley
two lavatories. The VC-137B was usually operated by an augmented crew of about
twenty, including three pilots (two were qualified aircraft commanders), two
navigators, two flight engineers, one crew chief, two communication systems
operators, six flight attendants and four security guards.”

Press Secretary Pierre Salinger had just sat down with a
book when the wire service machine bell rang five times and then began to clatter
text on paper.

Robert Manning, the assistant Secretary of State for Public
Affairs, a former newsman, knew that the bells meant breaking news, so he went
over and began reading the jumbled text as it came over the wire, tapped out by
an automatic typewriter:

Manning immediately took the disjointed report to Dean Rusk,
the senior cabinet member on board in the state room, and Rusk read it, and
told Manning to get Salinger.

In his book “With
Kennedy,” Pierre Salinger wrote: “By 7 A.M.,
our sleek blue and white presidential Boeing 707 jet was lifting off Hickam
Field, headed for Wake Island and Tokyo.
I was immersed in my reading sometime later when I felt a tap on my shoulder
and looked up. It was Robert Manning, ‘The Secretary wants to see you up
forward,’ he said. Up forward was the private cabin reserved for the President,
but used on this trip by the Secretary of State as the senior officer aboard.”

“I found the Secretary, grave-faced, holding a yellow piece
of paper in his hand. I recognized it instantly as coming from the plane’s
teletype machine. Because this plane was used a great deal by the President, it
carried sophisticated communications equipment not usually carried on
commercial airliners. One of these extra communications items was a newspaper
teletype. The other members of the Cabinet on the trip were already in the
cabin. As we waited for Myer Feldman of the White House staff and Walter
Heller, the chairman of the President’s Council on Economic Advisor’s, I looked
over Secretary Rusk’s shoulder, the words on the page were badly scrambled –
but what I managed to read was unbelievable.”

“I kept reading it over and over again as Feldman and Heller
pushed their way into the cabin. The words stayed on the paper. They would not
go away. Secretary Rusk read us the last brief bulletin.”

“‘My God!’ gasped Orville Freeman…..Then there was an
interminable silence as each man became lost in his private sorrow.”

“‘We’ve got to turn back right now,’” I said to Secretary
Rusk.”

“That’s right, but we have to verify this somehow. Get us in
communication with the White House and see if you can get Admiral Felt at
CINCPAC…”

“I pushed my way through the forward door of the cabin into
the communications section of the plane. ‘Get the White House and Admiral
Felt,’ I ordered the communicators, Sergeants Walter C. Baughman and Darrell
Skinner. In less than a minute, from almost 6000 miles away, I was talking to
the White House Situation Room, the operating nerve center of the nation.”

In the basement of the White House, the Situation Room was
set up in the aftermath of President Kennedy’s first crisis, the Bay
of Pigs, in early 1961. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, in his
book "A Thousand Day," notes
that JFK thought that one reason the Bay of Pigs failed
was because he received secondhand updates on the situation.

Michael Bohn, who once worked in the White Situation Room
and wrote it’s history in his book “Nerve Center” (2003), reported that, “Kennedy
and national security adviser McGeorge Bundy wanted a place where
they could get the same real-time info the Pentagon and the CIA got,
and where the chief executive and his closest advisers could weigh this data in
confidence and come to their own conclusions. In retrospect, lack of timely
updates may have played a minor role in the Bay of Pigs
fiasco. But in the weeks between the Bay of Pigs and May
15, Kennedy's naval aide Tazewell Shepard enlisted a bunch of Seabees
and turned part of the West Wing basement ‘into a facility that some political
scientists say changed the fundamental nature of the presidency.’"

As the Air Force One radio transmission reveal, Salinger was
put through to “Crown,” the code name for the White House, and when he asked for
the latest situation on the President, the operator asked if he wanted the
Situation Room.

Note: This patch on the Air Force One tapes can be found at (6:30) on the LBJ Library Tape at [03:57] on the Clifton Tape.

Salinger uses his code name, “Wayside.”

1 - White House, White House, this is Wayside, do you read me?
2 - This is White House. I read you loud and clear Wayside. Over.
3 - Can you give me the latest situation on President? Over.
4 - You want Situation Room? Is that a Roger?

5 - Repeat that transmission please?
6 - This is Crown, This is Crown. Do you want Situation Room?

7 - I want the Situation Room That’s affirmative.

8 - Roger, Roger getting them now.

9 - Stand by Please.
10- Wayside, Wayside, this is Crown. Situation Room is on. Go ahead.
11- Situation Room. This is Wayside, do you read me? Over.
12- This is the Situation Room. I read you. Go ahead.

In the Situation Room, Navy aide Oliver Hallett answers the
radio call. He is getting his information over the same news wires that put out
the first reports on the assassination – Associated Press and UPI, that they
call the “tickers.”

13- [Salinger] - Give me all available information on
President Over.

14- [Hallett] - All available information on President
follows. Ah, Connally. He and Governor Connally of Texas
have been hit in the car in which they were riding. We do not know how serious
the situation is, we have no information. Mr. Bromley Smith is back here in the
Situation Room now. We are getting our information over the tickers.
Over.

15- [Salinger] - That is affirmative, affirmative. Please be
advised that this is the plane on which the cabinet is on the way to Japan.
Those heading to (Japan)
are turning around and returning to Honolulu
and will be there in about two hours. Over

16 [Hallett] - I understand. Those heading to Japan are
turning around and heading to Honolulu and will be back there in two hours. Is
that correct? Over.

17- That’s Affirmative. Affirmative. Will need all
information to decide whether some of this party should go directly to Dallas. Over.

18- This is Situation Room. Say again your last please?
19- Will need to be advised to determine whether some members of this party
should go directly to Dallas? Over.
20- Roger, you wish information as to whether some members of that party should
go to Dallas.
21- Affirmative. Affirmative.
22- Do you have anything else, Wayside?
23- Any information you can give me as quickly as possible.
24- The Associated Press is coming out now with a bulletin that the President was
hit in the head. That just came in. Over.

25- Roger. Will get any new information to you.

26- Where are you Wayside?

27 - Wayside is off the line. This is the radio operator. We
are returning to Honolulu and should be back in Honolulu in about two hours.
Will be in the air for about two hours and in to Honolulu
and you can contact us on the ground there later.

28- I understand. This is….Hold, hold on the line there
Wayside, we have some more information coming up.

29-…right back.

[0652]

1- Ah, Wayside, Wayside, this is Situation Room. I read from
the AP bulletin. Kennedy apparently shot in head, he fell face down on the
backseat of his car. Blood was on his head. Mrs. Kennedy cried “Oh no,” and
tried to hold up his head. Connally remained half seated slumped to the left. There
was blood on his face and forehead. The President and Governor were rushed to
Parkland Hospital near the Dallas Trade Mart where Kennedy was to have made a
speech. Over

2 - I read that, over.
3 - This is Situation Room. I have nothing further for you now. I will contact
you if we get more.

4 - Wayside, Roger and out

5 - Situation Room out.

The Navy aide in the Situation Room, Oliver Hallett, within
the hour, would also learn from the wire service reports that the accused
assassin was former Marine Lee Harvey Oswald, who Hallett had known from
his stint as a Navy attaché at the US Embassy in Moscow.
Hallett was in the room when Oswald turned his passport over to the embassy
officer (Snyder).

Note 2 : When Salinger
was writing his book, the White House Communications Agency gave him a copy of
a transcript of the Air Force One radio communications that included his
conversations with the White House Situation Room. Salinger said that he gave
his copy of the transcript to the JFK Library in Boston,
but when Vincent Salandria requested this document, it could not be located.

As Salinger reported in his book, he said, “Situation Room,
this is Wayside [my code name]. Can you give me latest situation on Lancer [the
President’s code name]?

“The answer came right back: ‘He and Governor Connally have
been hit in car in which they were riding.’”

“I replied: ‘Please keep us advised. Secretary Rusk is on
this plane headed for Japan.
We are returning to Honolulu. Will
be there in a bout two hours. We will need to be advised to determine whether
some members should go direct to Dallas.’”

“I put the microphone down and told Sergeant Baughman to
keep the line open and working on our call to Admiral Felt and stepped back
into the cabin to report to Secretary Rusk. He promptly ordered the plane to
turn around.”

“The radio operator called me forward almost immediately to
take a call from the Situation Room: ‘AP bulletin is just coming in. President
hit in the head. That just came in.’”

“‘Understand. President hit in the head,’ I replied, heading
back to Secretary Rusk’s cabin. We were then 1200 miles from Wake
Island and 800 miles from Hawaii.
Secretary Rusk had swiftly taken control of the situation. If the President
lived, he felt it was essential that certain members of the party on the plane
go immediately to Dallas, to his
side. Others should get back to Washington
as soon as possible. The Secretary decided that he, Bob Manning, and I should
go to Dallas, and that the others
on the plane should go back to the Capital….Communications were established
with Admiral Harry D. Felt.”

Admiral Harry D. Felt, the commander of the Pacific Command
– CINPAC, as we later learned, was the only theater commander to raise the
military alert status as a result of the assassination, increasing it from
Defcon 5 to Defcon 4, a state of increased readiness over an area that included
all the US
forces in the Pacific, including Vietnam.

Salinger: “The plane roared through the early morning skies.
We were informed that a jet had been set up for a trip to Dallas,
if necessary. I got two more messages. The first was from ‘Stranger.’ He said
our plane was to turn around and go back to Washington.

[14:44]

- Go ahead, please
- Wayside? Wayside? This is Stranger. Do you read me? Over.
- This is Wayside. Go ahead.
- Kilduff asked that all cabinet members return to Washington
immediately. Over.
- We are enroute to Honolulu, where
we have ah....Washington. Over
- Roger Roger, will they notifiy us of time of arrival and location? Over
- Roger, Roger, we do not have any firm....as to the exact status...go...Dallas...Wayside....go
ahead.
- Wayside this is Stranger, I'll get that information...over.

Salinger: “My report of these messages seriously troubled
Secretary Rusk. He wanted to know who Stranger was. Aboard every presidential
jet there is usually a White House codebook. We searched for it for about five
minutes, but there was none aboard this plane.”

“'We have to know who Stranger is,’” Secretary Rusk said. ‘We
don’t know what is happening in Dallas.
Who is the government now?’”

“And certainly this was a question running through
everybody’s mind. We had no further word on President Kennedy. Was his shooting
an isolated event or part of a national or international conspiracy? Certainly,
if the latter were true, our own plane was not immune to attack because any
foreign power which had planned the shooting of the President would certainly
not be unaware of the fact that six of his ten Cabinet members were in an
airplane high over the Pacific.”

Salinger says, and as the tapes confirm, “The decision was
made that I was to break the code and find out the identity of Stranger.”

[17:20]

- Liberty?
- Go ahead.
- 86972, 86972 Andrews.
- 86972 You are loud and clear.
- Roger. Give me the name, the real name of Stranger please...from the White
House
- Roger. Say again the name. What is the name sir? Stranger.
- Stranger – S-T-R-A-N-G-E-R

“In a minute, I got the answer back.”

[18:20]

- SAM Command Post is on
will you give them a call?
- ....Mr. Jackson from the state department.
- We are returning to Hickham field...three zero Zulu...We are standing by for
more information.
- Stand by for just a moment sir.
- Roger, Roger Seven two, Let us know when you are going to leave Hickam and
what your destination is.
- Okay we will keep you advised, have Wayside give them a call.
- That's a Roger 72.
- 86972 – Andrews.
- Andrews.
- Roger. In reference to request. A Major Harold R. Patterson, Major Harold R.
Paterson.

Salinger: “Stranger was Major Harold R. Patterson, a
high-ranking officer in the White House Communications Agency. He was, at the
time of his transmission to our plane, in WashingtonD.C. I knew Paterson
well. He was one of the most trusted members of the White House staff and he
would not have sent us the message without very clear instructions….”

“The messages kept coming off the wire service machine and
finally one started grinding out the story of Lee Harvey Oswald and his
previous life in Russia
and his membership in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. This went against all
the preconceived theories we had established.”

“’If this is true,’ Secretary Rusk said, ‘this is going to
have repercussions around the world for years to come.’ His words were
prophetic because even today, only in the United
States is the report of the Warren
Commission, fixing the sole responsibility on Oswald, widely believed…”

“It took us only eight hours and thirty-one minutes to make
the non-stop flight from Honolulu
to Andrews Air Force Base. We arrived there at 12:31
A.M., Washington
time, and stepped out of the plane into a barrage of lights from television
cameras…”

In an article, “The Tokyo Flight - Coincidence or Conspiracy?” Ronald L. Ecker considers the idea that if the assassination
was a high level coup, the presence of the cabinet on the plane over the
Pacific was possibly part of the plot. He reviewed these same facts and
concluded, “And that was the extent of the missing code book crisis. The code
book should not have been missing, but its absence, which proved to be of no
real consequence, does not by itself mean something sinister. Still, Rusk's
concern over 'Stranger' illustrates the fact that conspirators would certainly
have been able to take advantage of there being no code book on board under a
worst-case scenario.”

Just as Col. Fletcher Prouty suspected he was sent to
Antartica to get him out of the way at the time of the assassination, there is
the suggestion that it wasn’t a coincidence that most of the cabinet were on a
plane on the other side of the world, and additional evidence of chichainery is
the fact that the code book was missing.

While one such incident may be happenstance, and two might
be a coincidence, three such incidences stretches credulity, and John Judge
presents just such a case.

Judge recalls meeting a SAC pilot who told him that the code
books aboard SAC planes were also missing on the day of the assassination.

John Judge, the director of COPA – the Coalition on
Political Assassinations, attended the University
of Dayton, in Dayton,
Ohio, also the home of Wright-Patterson Air
Force Base. While there in the 1970s, Judge was a guest at the Wright-Pat
Officers Club, where he talked with an officer who said he was a Strategic Air
Command pilot of a nuclear armed B-52 during the Cuban Missile Crisis and when
President Kennedy was killed. This pilot told Judge that he came to within 30
seconds of reaching the Fail Safe point during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Then on the day JFK was assassinated, they were in the air
on their regular shift that maintained a fleet of armed bombers in the air on a
24 hour basis. When they learned that the President had been shot, over civilian
commercial radio, they thought they would receive new orders and in preparation
for that they opened the plane’s safe to get the code books that are needed to
translate and confirm any orders, and it was missing. While they didn’t get any
orders while airborne, when they returned to their base, they compared notes with other
pilots, and they too said their code books were missing.

Scene From Dr. Strangelove:
"Captain, the Code Book is missing, and Plan R says we should bomb Havana"

Slim Pickins: "Well Golly-Gee, let's go get them commie bastards"

John Judge also recalls reading an early batch of records
released under the JFK Act from the Segregated Section, possibly an NSA
document which was labeled “Defcon Status.”

Judge requested that file and a box of records were brought
out. One of the items in the box included a false press report that Air Force Gen.
LeMay was killed in an airplane crash that morning.

Other files in the box included reports for each continental
– theater commands, indicating that the Defcon status for all of the commands
remained unchanged except for one – Southeast Asia and
the Pacific Command – CINPAC, which went from 5 to 4.

Larry Hancock, in “Someone
Would Have Talked” (Lancer 2006, p. 304) wrote: “But Johnson himself shows
no indication of seriously fearing Soviet involvement. In the hours following
the assassination he ordered absolutely no actions pertaining to military
preparedness or national security. Nor did he direct any special intelligence
activities against either the Soviets or Cubans. This lack of action on
Johnson’s part is confirmed by a White House memorandum written on December 4, 1963, by Bromley Smith in
regard to ‘Changes in Defense Readiness Conditions as a Result of the
Assassination of President Kennedy.’ This memo summarizes the authority granted
to the Joint Chiefs and documents their ‘Defcon’ actions following the
assassination. According to the memo, the Joint Chiefs, acting on their own
initiative, increased the defense readiness condition from Defcon 5 (the lowest
peace time condition) to Defcon 4 at 2:50 EST
on November 22 and returned to Defcon 5 at 12:30
on Sunday November 24. The Commander in Chief Pacific (CINPAC) on his own
initiative had directed his forces to Defcon 3 at 3:13 PM on November 22, something he was fully authorized
to do. This memo provides solid proof that the US
military did not move overall to a major elevation of defense readiness,
suggesting any fear of foreign involvement or that the assassination was a
precursor to an attack.”

Bromley Smith, author of this report, was also present in
the White House Situation Room shortly after the assassination and is specifically mentioned
on the Air Force One tapes.

Larry Hancock: “Beyond that there is no evidence that the
Joint Chiefs or the Secretary of Defense took any other than very limited
precautions. When the Chiefs were informed of the assassination, they remained
in a meeting together, not even dispensing to their respective operational or
command centers. Given that the assassination occurred at the height of the
cold war (only a year after the Cuban missile crisis), and that certain defense
scenarios anticipated elimination of US leaders as part of any Soviet attack,
this apparent lack of a stronger reaction seems rather amazing.”

Both Hallet, author of this report, and Bromley Smith were present in
the White House Situation Room shortly after the assassination and is mentioned
on the Air Force One tapes.

202-10002-10180
MEMORANDUM FOR: BROMLEY SMITH
THE WHITE HOUSEWASHINGTON4 DECEMBER 1963
Subj. CHANGES IN DEFENSE READINESS CONDITIONS AS A RESULT OF ASSASSINATION OF
PRESIDENT KENNEDY
MEMORANDUM FOR:
Bromley Smith

1. By the authority granted under Joint Chiefs of Staff Emergency Action
Procedures (SM-600-63) dated 12 June 1963, the JCS [redacted] or higher
authority are authorized to declare Defense Readiness Conditions [DEFCONS] 1,
2, 3, 4, and 5. A copy of Chapter Four of this publication is appended under
Tab A.
2. Acting on this authority, the JCS after news of the Dallas
shooting was received issued their message 3675 at 2:15 p.m. November 22.
3. Acting on this message [redacted] Copies of the three messages are appended
under Tab C
4. [redacted] A copy of this directive is appended under Tab D (U.S.
forces in Vietnam
are in DEFCON 3 on a continuing basis)
5. [redacted] The NMCC received no other notifcations other than those
specified above and appended. If a commander took precautions within his
command [redacted] he need not necessarily inform the JCOS of them. NMCC
received no other message.
notifications.

If this report is correct, and U.S.
forces in Vietnam
are on a constant DEFCON 3 basis, then their status went to DEFCON 2, one step
away from war.

The commander of CINPAC, the only command to change its
alert status, was Admiral Felt, the person Secretary Rusk tried to contact as
soon as he learned that President Kennedy had been shot.

"Stranger," - Major Harold Patterson, recalls the incident and says that when Salinger requested to know his identity, Salinger was told to check the code book on the plane, but this part of the conversation is not on the existing Air Force One radio transmission tapes, further proof that many of the relevant recorded conversations have been eliminated from the edited tapes that exist today.

SAC RADIO SILENCE ORDER

Besides the Joint Chiefs issuing the still classified Message
3675 at 2:15 PM on 11/22/63, they apparently also ordered all Air Force planes
honor radio silence, as Gerald Blaine reports:

“Art Godfrey’s midnight shift agents
in Austin were headed back to Washington D.C. on a Strategic Air Command (SAC)
KC135 that had departed Bergstrom Air Force Base at 3:00 PM. They’d rushed from
their hotel to the base, and by the time they had boarded the plane, they still
didn’t know whether President Kennedy was alive or dead. The military had all their units on radio silence because of a
Strategic Air Command order, and except for the droning of the engines and
occasional bits of information gleaned from commercial radio reports heard by
those in the cockpit and passed back to them, there was complete silence during
the long flight to Washington.”